


Standing At a Distance

by AceQueenKing



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 21:00:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6393595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's not the first refugee Aurelius notices, but she's the one who he can't stop thinking about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standing At a Distance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [origo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/origo/gifts).



1\. She's not the first kid he's seen wandering the docks.

Especially not these days. Aurelius didn't think he'd ever see anything worse than his time on Invictus, but the reapers had proved him wrong. They'd made a mockery not just of one poor, backwater nation, but of an entire god damn galaxy.

He should be immune to it by now, working docks on the Citadel. People pour in all hours of his shift, day or night, but Aurelius just tells them all the same thing: _I'm sorry. I can't admit you. Please contact your representative._

(Your representative, he knows, will never come. Not even Sparatus.)

As such, he tries to ignore them. _Tries_ being the operative word. He's not had a decent sleep since the war began, and even though he tries to remember all the faces, after a while they all look the same. _I'm sorry. I can't admit you. Please contact your representative._

But she still catches his attention.

He doesn't know her name, but he knows her face: one of the first to arrive, human, more lost looking than most here. She's tale, willowy; he's not much good at telling human ages but she's an adolescent, he thinks.

That gawkiness doesn't belong anywhere else.

Still, she's got a way about her that haunts him. She's a good kid, a kind kid: the sort who spends what little money she has her first day buying a pair of mewling Batarian twins some kind of sugar candy. Kids like her are rare, and becoming rarer still in the war. She catches him looking at her across the docks, and she smiles.

Most humans don't bother to do that with turians.

He nods, stiffly, in reply, and watches her grin get bigger.

2.  
  
She's still smiling a couple weeks later, but he notices that the edges of her grin are starting to wear thin. Two weeks of sleeping on the hard plastisteel benches the Council deems "adequate shelter" is enough to wipe the smile off of anyone's face. He thinks of his bed, warm in the apartment he rents in the lowest-rent district of Tayseri, and feels guilt settle heavy in his chest.

Somehow, she still finds a way to smiles prettily and grins when she comes up to his counter, asking him the same question she's asked him for the past three weeks: "Do you have any shuttles coming in from Reach? My parents are supposed to be on the next shuttle over."

He doesn't need to check the schedule to know that there isn't another shuttle coming and there damn well isn't going to be, but for her, he does it anyway.

3.  
  
Of all the refugees, the human kid is the one that he can't get out of his mind. He thinks of her, even when he's not on duty. He wonders what humans drink for breakfast as he's roasting his _kafa_ ; he wonders if she slept alright as he browses through the morning papers.

He's careful not to stare at her too much while he's on duty; he's a guard, not a guardian. But he notices as her clothes get more threadbare, as her face gets more gaunt. His stomach starts to sink in turn when he sees her hungry, and the thought of it just burns him up inside. It's not right.

He's torn between duty and desire; turian duty dictates that he can't help her, not any more than he can help any refugee. Desire, of course, tells him that he should help her. Perhaps he could invite her to stay with him? There's odder choices in room-mates, in friends. In the end times, Aurelius thinks, what spirit could condemn him for giving her a home?

But even if he can appease the spirits, appeasing the Council is another matter entirely. They've cracked down a lot on just on what people – and _what kind of people_ – are allowed on the Citadel. And he doubts some human teen from a dirt poor colony is going to be on the cleared list.

He waits and waits, his insides twisted up into knots as the kid gets closer and closer to wasting away. He sees her even when he's off duty, her haunted eyes as she waits and waits for a ship that doesn't come. He tries not to let the injustice of it burn him up inside, but it does, especially when scum like _Aria T'Loak_ walks through his station merely because someone upstairs fast tracks _their_ applications while good, ordinary citizens starve in the streets.

Invictus all over again.

But he is a turian, and he endures. He reports for duty. He greets refugees, answers questions. He tells them all the same thing: _I'm sorry, I can't help you. Please contact your representative._

Then there comes a day she just stops smiling and—finally, _finally_ , he just can't take it anymore. He throws off his armor as he gets off duty, hap-haphazardly shoving it into the locker. Bereen looks at him like he's lost his mind; he doesn't explain. His mind is made up, and he's going to do it, do it now before he can regret it.

He catches her eyes from across the room.

"Kid!" He says, and thirty eyes turn turn toward him. He touches her on the shoulder, and twenty nine eyes shirk away from him.

"Yes, sir?" She says quietly. He doesn't like that. Kid wasn't quiet a few days ago.

"What's your name?" He says. He tries to keep his voice gentle; he lowers his mandibles in what he hopes she'll read as a sort of smile.

"Claudia," she says, mumbling. "My name is Claudia."

"Claudia," he says, the strange syllables twisting in his mouth. "My name is Aurelius. Do you remember me?”

“You're one of the guards at the station.” Her eyes flick toward his, sorrowful to the very soul. “Have I done something wrong, sir…?”  
  
“Not at all.” He wants to place a hand on her shoulder, but he does not know human cultural mores well enough to know if that's a bridge too far to cross. “I noticed you've spent most of your credits helping to feed some of the worse off refugees. Thought maybe you'd want to go get something to eat, Claudia?"

"I can't," she says softly, her mouth twisting into what even he recognizes is a frown. "My parents are coming and I—I have to -- "

"I'm a guard here, on the docks." He taps the communicator on the side of his head. "If any ships come, I'll get word."

She looks at his earpiece dubiously. "How far a range do you have on that thing?"

"Anywhere on the docks.” He points toward the distance, past the vending machines and toward the _real_ food. “Close enough we can get a spot to eat, I promise. We can eat watching the ships, if you'd like. Just in case.”

“My mother said the Citadel had the best restaurants,” the girl says, and she might not have sub-vocals but he can hear the sadness in her voice.

4\. They eat together in one of the shabby dextro/levo places on the docks, a Fish Dog Foodshack. It's nothing special, but for the first time in months, food has a flavor for him – and he's well aware it's not just the tummy tickling tuchanka sauce.

Claudia looks at him and she smiles for the first time in months; they don't talk about anything particularly funny, but they talk about their homelands, their childhoods. They talk about their families, their pets – she left behind a pet Varren named Pollock that she hopes is alright, and he thinks of dear Nemus, who he can only hope his mother still has out in the fields of _triticum_ by his homeland.

“Thank you,” she says, when they finish eating. “For your kindness.”  
  
“Thank _you_ ,” he says, then: “Will you be alright? Is it alright for you...being here, I mean?”  
  
It's a stupid question, he knows. There isn't much he can do if she isn't.

“It's a little cold,” she says, and for the first time he realizes that the thin little shirt that she wears probably isn't good at keeping her warm. But Claudia just gives him a little smile. “I'll manage, though.”  
  
The next time he comes to see her, he brings a blanket.

5.  
  
He starts eating most of his meals with Claudia. Bereen starts to tease him about it in the locker room – _got a smoothskin fetish?_ – but he just ignores it. There's enough pain in the galaxy, and eating with Claudia reminds him that it's possible to somehow still look forward to life, even now. He needs that; needs her soft smiles and gentle voice reminding him that, somehow, it will be alright.

It beats thinking about home, about Nemus and his mother, about Invictus.

Claudia, he knows, has come to need their little breaks together, too – she relaxes in his presence, now. She's learned to read his sub-vocals a bit; she understands the difference between a teasing tone and a serious one. He has a feeling it's not just the food that makes her happy to see him – the fishdog foodshack isn't that great, and it certainly doesn't explain why she keeps him company at the counter when the amount of times that he's turned people away weighs on him.

  
“Aurelius!” She grins happily as she sees him. He feels his heart beat faster as she smiles. “Guess what?”  
  
“What?” He asks, tilting his head. He wonders, for one heart pounding second, if her application for admittance has come through.

“Today is my birthday.” She grins. “Eighteen today!”

“Ah,” He says.

“Aren't you going to wish me a happy birthday?”  
  
“Is that what humans do?” He asks, mandibles pulling up slightly in a nervous flutter. He's never sure of the human customs.

“Yes!”

“Then happy birthday.” He smiles at her, reaches out a hand. “Fishdog?”

“Of course.” She says, taking his hand. “I will pay you back for all these meals when...”

She frowns, and he knows all too well the end of her sentence.

“Don't worry about it.”  
  
6.  
  
One week after they celebrate her birthday – along with a strange, spongy substance she calls _cake_ that even he can't resist taking a small bite of, levo or no – he comes to the station and finds her sitting on one of the plastisteel chairs, tears streaming down her face.

He should clock in for his rounds, but instead he goes to her, kneels in front of her.

“Claudia…?”  
  
“They're gone.” She says softly, holding onto a datapad. He doesn't need to ask where she got it; judging from the dirt and cracks, it's obviously one someone dropped on their way out of the Citadel. She hands it to him, and his stomach plunges straight into his gizzard when he sees the headline on the newspaper she's brought up: _No Response to Rescue Parties in Reach;_ _C_ _olony Devestated By Reaper Attack_.

“I'm sorry.” He says, folding his arms around her. “I'm sorry.”

She flies into his arms and he holds her tight.

He calls in sick for his shift, but not even Bereen gives him crap for it.

7.  
  
That night, with human tears still wet on his cowl, he goes to his landlord.

“Ah, Aurelius.” Latisa T'zen grins at him from her seat in her office. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”  
  
“I'd like to add a roommate to my lease,” he says, knowing that this is just the opening salvo in this fight.

“Alright,” she says, bringing up his lease on the omni. “When do you want them to move in?”  
  
“Immediately, preferably.”  
  
“Hold up.” She gives him an odd look. “Name?”  
  
“Claudia Smith.”

Her lips twitch. “A human?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Huh.” She shakes her head. “Well, what's her current address? I'll need to call her landlord for reference.”  
  
“She's on the docks,” he says, and Latisa puts her head in her hands.

“Aurelius,” she groans through gritted teeth. “I can't just add some dock rat because – “  
  
“She is _not_ a dock rat.” He growls.

“Well, regardless...” She sighs. “You know the council has been very strict about the dock r-….refugees coming in.”

“I know. But she's a good person, and she _deserves_ a place here. I'll pay her way, you don't have to worry.”  
  
“I'm not going to lose my landlord accreditation just so you can get your human sweetheart smuggled in here.” She sighs. “Look I get it, I mean there are a lot of good people mixed in with the ra...refugees. But unless she's you're wife, or your daughter, or some other kind of family member, I can't break the rules. You know that.”  
  
He stares at her for a moment, blinking as an idea comes so fast that it burns. _Make her family, and she can stay._

“Can you repeat that?” He asks, hope fluttering in his chest.

“I'm really sorry.”

“No, the-- the other part.”  
  
“Unless she's family, she can't come in. That's the rules the council laid down to try to prevent mass immigration, and that's the rules I have to stick to.”  
  
“Thank you,” he says, a feeling halfway between hope and dread burning in his belly. “Thank you.”

She looks puzzled, but he doesn't bother to explain.

8.

He calls in the next morning and looks for her on the docks, a fever dream burning in his mind. He's laid awake all night thinking of it. It is not so odd an idea, perhaps – two kids from the colonies is a common enough story. Does it really matter that one is human and one is not?

Their company together is agreeable enough. And it isn't, he thinks, as if either of them can go home again.  
  
He doesn't know human courtship rituals, and he can't bring himself to take the time to learn; he's too full of life, bursting at the seems with eagerness.

She's sleeping on one of the cots, her blond hair mussed over her face. He places a hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently.

“Aurelius?” She yawns, but doesn't get up.

He kneels down, folding her strange hair back behind her odd ears. It reminds him of the  _triticum_ at home, billowing with the harvest. 

“Marry me,” he breathes softly.

“What?” She sits up, her eyes bleary and red. “Aurelius – “  
  
“I know I'm turian,” he says, the words spilling out before he can stop them. “And perhaps not what you expected, and perhaps I'm not the handsomest kind or the youngest or the smartest but…. If we marry, I can get you past the docks. Into the Citadel proper.”

He swallows, the words stuck in his throat. “And I may not be the sort of man you deserve, but I could – we could work well together, I think.”  
  
“Aurelius – “  
  
“I know you just lost your family and it's not the best time but...” He sighs. “You're the only good thing I've found in this war and there's nothing I wouldn't do for – “  
  
“Aurelius, stop.” She sniffles softly. “Yes.”  
  
“I know I – yes?” He blinks, his heart going so fast that it threatens to explode out from his chest. “Yes?”  
  
“Yes.” She grabs one of his hands, holds it in her own, and Aurelius feels a new story beginning between them.

 


End file.
